A SHADOW IN THE FOG
Again I saw that glow from the Gilbert garage, hanging on the fog; a
luminosity of the fog; saw it disappear as the mist deepened and
shrouded it. But Worth was answering me, and somehow his words seemed
forced;
"Sit tight a minute, Jerry. Have another cup of coffee while I
telephone, then I'll put the roadster in and open up down there. I'll
call you--or you can see my lights."
He left me. I heard him at the instrument in the hall get his number,
talk to some one in a low voice, and then go out the front door; next
thing was the sound of the motor, the glare of its lamps as it rounded
into the driveway and started down back, illuminating everything. In the
general glare thrown on the fog, the fainter light was invisible, but
across a plot of kitchen garden I saw where it had been; a square, squat
building of concrete, flat roofed, vining plants in boxes drooping over
its cornice; the typical garage of such an establishment, but nearly
double the usual size. The light had come from there, but how? In the
short time that the lamps of the machine were showing it up to me, there
seemed no windows on this side; only the double doors for the car's
entrance--closed now--and a single door which was crossed by two heavy,
barricading planks nailed in the form of a great X.
Worth ran the machine close up against the doors, jumped down, and I
could see his tall form, blurred by the mist, moving about to slide them
open. The lamps of the roadster made little showing now as he rolled it
in. Then these were switched off and everything down there was dark as a
pocket. For a time I sat and waited for him to light up and call me,
then started down. The fog was making the kind of dimness that has a
curious, illusory character. I suppose I had gone half the distance of
the garden walk, when, thrown up startlingly on the obscurity, I saw a
square of white, and across that shining screen, moved the silhouette of
a human head. The whole thing danced before my eyes for a bare second,
then blackness.
With Cummings' queer hints in my mind, I started running across the
garden toward it. About the first thing I did was step into a cold
frame, plunging my foot through the glass, all but going to my knees in
it; and when I got up, swearing, I was turned around, ran into bushes,
tripped over obstructions, and traveled, I think, in a circle.
Then I began to go more cautiously. No use getting excited. That was
only Worth I had seen. And still I was unwilling to call, ask him to
show a light. I groped along until my outstretched fingers came across
the corner of a building, rough, stonelike--the concrete garage and
study. I felt along, seeing a bit now, and was soon passing my hands
over the barricading planks of that door.
I might have lit a match, but I preferred to find out what I could by
feeling around, and that cautiously. I discovered that the door had been
broken in, the top panels shattered to kindling wood, the force of the
assault having burst a hinge, so that the whole thing sagged drunkenly
behind the heavy planks that propped it, while a strong bolt, quite
useless, was still clamped into a socket which had been torn, screws and
all, from the inside casing.
Sliding my hands over the broken top panel I found that it had been
covered on its inner side by a piece of canvas; the screen on which that
shadow had been thrown--from within the room. There was no light there
now; there was no sound of motion within. The drip of the fog from the
eaves was the only break in the stillness.
"Worth?" I shouted, at last, and he answered me instantly, hallooing
from behind me, and to one side of the house. I could hear him running
and when he spoke it was close to my shoulder.
"Where are you, Jerry?"
"Where are you," I countered. "Or rather, where have you been?"
"Getting a bar to pry off these boards."
"A bar?" I echoed stupidly.
"A crowbar from the shed. These planks will have to come off to let us
in."
"The devil you say!" I was exasperated. "There's some one in here
now--or was a minute back. Show me the other way in."
I heard the ring of the steel bar as its end hit the hard graveled path.
"Some one in there? Jerry, you're seeing things."
"Sure I am," I agreed drily. "But you get me to that other door quick!"
"The only other door is locked. I tried it from the garage. You're
dreaming."
For reply, I ran up to the door and thrust my fist through the canvas,
ripping it away from its clumsy tacking.
"Who's in there?" I cried. "Answer me!"
Dead silence; then a click as Worth snapped on a flood of light from his
pocket torch, saying tolerantly, tiredly,
"I told you there was no one. There couldn't be."
"I tell you, Worth, there was. I saw the shadow on the square of that
canvas. Give me the torch."
I pushed the flashlight through the opening and played the light cone
about the room in a quick survey; then brought the circle of white glow
to rest upon one of the side walls; and my hand went down and back to
grip fingers about the butt of my revolver. There was, as Worth had
said, but one other door to this room; but more, there was apparently no
other exit; no windows, no breaks in the walls. My circle of light was
on this second door; and the very heart of that circle was a heavy steel
bolt on the door, the bar of which was firmly shot into the socket on
the frame. The only exit from that room, other than the door through
which I now leaned with pistol raised, was locked--bolted from the
inside!
Worth was crowding his big frame into the opening beside me.
"Keep back," I growled. "Some one's inside," and I sent the light shaft
into corners to drive out the shadows, to cut in under the desk and
chairs. Worth's reply was a laugh, and his arm went by me to reach
inside the door. Then, as his fingers found the button, a light sprang
out from a lamp upon the center desk.
"You're letting your nerves play the deuce with you, Jerry," he said
lightly. "Make way for my crowbar and we'll get in out of the wet."
I made no answer, but for a long moment more I searched that room with
my eyes; but it was the kind you see all over at a glance. Big, square,
plain, it hadn't a window in it; the walls, lined with book shelves,
floor to ceiling; a fireplace; a library table with drawers; a few
chairs. No chance for a hideout. I glanced at the ceiling and confirmed
the evidence of my eyes. There was a skylight, and through it had come
that curious glow that first attracted my attention to the place.
Then I gave Worth room to wield his tools on the barred door, while I
ran quickly back to the house, into the kitchen, and plumped down in the
chair where I had sat before. The light showed on the fog, brightened
and dimmed as the mist drifted past. There was no possibility of a
mistake: some one had been in the study, had turned on the table lamp,
had projected his shadow against the patched panel of the door, and had
somehow left the room, one door bolted, the only other exit barred and
nailed.
I went back and rejoined Worth who was standing where a brownish stain
on the rug marked a spot a little nearer the corner of the table than it
was to the outer door. A curious place for a suicide to fall. Behind the
table was the library chair in which Thomas Gilbert worked when at his
desk; beside it a small cabinet with a humidor on its top and the open
door below revealing several decanters and bottles, whisky and wine
glasses, a tray; between the desk and the fireplace were two other
chairs, large and comfortable; but in front of the table--between it and
the door--was barren floor.
It is a fact that most men who shoot themselves do so while sitting;
some lying in a bed; few standing. The psychology of this I must leave
to others, but experience has taught me to question the suicide of one
who has seemingly placed the muzzle of a revolver against him while on
his feet. Thomas Gilbert had stood; had chosen to take his life as he
was walking from door to desk, or from desk to door.
"Worth," I said. "There was somebody in here just now."
"Couldn't have been, Jerry," he answered absently; then added, his eyes
on that stain, "I never could calculate what my father would do. But
when I talked to him last night, right here in this room, he didn't seem
to me a man ready to take his own life."
"You quarreled?"
"We always quarreled, whenever we met."
"But this quarrel was more bitter than usual?"
"The last quarrel would seem the bitterest, wouldn't it, Jerry?" he
asked. Then, after a moment, "Poor Jim Edwards!"
I caught my tongue to hold back the question. Worth went on,
"When I phoned him just now, he hadn't heard a word about it. Seemed
terribly upset."
"Hadn't heard?" I echoed. "How was that?"
"You know we saw him at Tait's last night. He took the Pacheco Pass road
from San Francisco; drove straight to his ranch without hitting Santa
Ysobel."
I wanted another look at that man Edwards. I was to have it. Worth went
on absently,
"He'll be along presently to stay here while I'm away Monday. Told me it
would be the first time he'd put foot in the house for four years. As
boys up in Sonoma county, he and father always disagreed, but sometime
these last years there was a big split over something. They were barely
on speaking terms--and good old Jim took my news harder than as though
I'd been telling him the death of a near friend."
"Works like that with us humans," I nodded. "Let some one die that
you've disagreed with, and you remember every row you ever had with
them; remember it and regret it--which is foolish."
"Which is foolish," Worth repeated, and seemed for the first time able
to get away from the spot at which he had stopped.
He went over to the empty, fireless hearth and stood there, his back to
the room, elbows on the mantel propping his head, face bent, oblivious
to anything that I might do. It oughtn't to be hard to find the way this
place could be entered and left by a man solid enough to cast a shadow,
with quick fingers to snap the light on and off. But when I made a
painstaking examination of a corner grate with a flue too small for
anything but a chimney swallow to go up and down, a ceiling solidly
beamed and paneled, the glass that formed the skylight set in firmly as
part of the roof, when I'd turned up rugs and inspected an unbroken
floor, even tried the corners of book cases to see if they masked a
false entrance, I owned myself, for the moment, beaten there.
"Give me your torch--or go with me, Worth," I said. "I'd like to take a
scoot around outside."
He didn't speak, only indicated the flashlight by a motion, where it lay
on the shelf beside his hand. I took it, unbolted the door, and stepped
into the garage.
Everything all right here. My roadster; a much handsomer small machine
beyond it; a bench, portable forge and drill made a repair shop of one
corner, and as my light flashed over these, I checked and stared. Why
had Worth gone to the shed hunting a crowbar to open the door? Here were
tools that would have served as well. I put from me the hateful thought,
and damned Cummings and his suspicions. The shadow didn't have to be
Worth. Certainly he had not first lit that lamp, for I had seen it from
the kitchen with him beside me. Some one other than Worth had been in
there when Worth put up the roadster. I'd find the man it really was.
But even as I crossed to Eddie Hughes's door, something at the back of
my head was saying to me that Worth could have been in that room--that
there was time for it to be, if he had taken the crowbar from the garage
and not from the shed as he said he did.
At this I took myself in hand. The lie would have been so clumsy a one
that there was no way but to accept this statement for the truth; and
some one else had made that shadow on the canvas.
I tried the chauffeur's door and found it locked; called, shook it, and
had set my shoulder against it to burst it in, when the rolling door on
the street side moved a little, and a voice said,
"H-y-ah! What you doin' there?"
I turned and flashed my light on the six-inch crack of the sliding door.
It gave me a strip of man, a long drab face at top, solid, meaty
looking, yet somehow slightly cadaverous, a half shut eye, a crooked
mouth--if I'd met that mug in San Francisco, I'd have labeled it
"tough," and located it South of Market Street.
Slowly, it seemed rather reluctantly, Eddie Hughes worked the six-inch
crack wider by working himself through it.
"What the hell do you want in my room for?" he demanded. The form of the
words was truculent, but the words themselves slid in a sort of
spiritless fashion from the corner of that crooked mouth of his, and he
added in the next breath, "I'll open up for you, when I've lit the
blinks."
There was a central lamp that made the whole place as bright as day.
Eddie fumbled a key out of his pocket, threw the door of his room open,
and stepped back to let me pass him.
"Capehart tells me Worth's here," he said as we went in.
"When?" I gave him a sharp look. He seemed not to notice it.
"Just now. I came straight from there."
He came straight from there? Did he supply an alibi so neatly because of
that shadowy head on the door panel? For a long minute we each took
measure of the other, but Eddie's nerves were less reliable than mine;
he spoke first.
"Well?" he grunted, scarcely above his breath. And when I continued to
stare silently at him, he writhed a shoulder with, "What's doing? What
d'yuh want of me?"
Still silently, I pulled out with my thumb through the armhole of my
vest the police badge pinned to the suspender. His ill-colored face went
a shade nearer the yellow white of tallow.
"What for?" he asked huskily. "You haven't got nothin' on me. It was
suicide--cor'ner's jury says so. Lord! It has to be, him layin' there,
all hunched up on the floor, his gun so tight in his mitt that they had
to pry the fingers off it!"
"So you found the body?"
He nodded and gulped.
"I told all I knowed at the inquest," he said doggedly.
"Tell it again," I commanded.
Standing there, working his hands together as though he held some small,
accustomed tool that he was turning, shifting from foot to foot, with
long breaks in his speech, the chauffeur finally put me into possession
of what he knew--or what he wished me to know. He had been out all
night. That was usual with him Saturdays. Where? Over around the
canneries. Had friends that lived there. He got into this place about
dawn, and went straight to bed.
"Hold on, Hughes," I stopped him there. "You never went to bed--that
night, or any other night--until you'd had a jolt from the bottle
inside."
He gave me a surly, half frightened glance, then said quickly,
"Not a chance. Bolts on the doors, locks everywhere; all tight as a
jail. Take it from me, he wasn't the kind you want to have a run-in
with--any time. Always just as cool as ice himself; try to make you
believe he could tell what you were up to, clear across town. Hold it
over you as if he was God almighty that stuck folks together and set 'em
walkin' around and thinkin' things."
He broke off and looked over his shoulder in the direction of the study.
The walls were thick--concrete; the door heavy. No sound of Worth's
moving in there could be heard in this room. Apparently it was the old
terror of his employer, or the new terror of the employer's death, that
spoke when he said,
"I got up this morning late with a throat like the back of a chimney.
Lord! I never wanted a drink so bad in my life--had to have one. The
chink leaves my breakfast for me Sundays; but I knew I couldn't eat till
I'd had one. So I--so I--"
It was as though some recollection fairly choked off his voice. I
finished for him.
"So you went in there--" I pointed at the study door, "and found the
body."
"Naw! How the hell could I? I told you--locked. I crawled up on the
roof, though; huntin' a way in, and I looked through the skylight. There
he was. On the floor. His eyes weren't open much, but they was watchin'
me--sort of sneerin'. I come down off that roof like a bat outa hell,
and scuttled over to Vandeman's where his chink was on the porch, I
bellerin' at him. I telephoned from there. For the bulls; and the
cor'ner; and everybody. Gawd! I was all in."
I caught one point in the tale.
"So the way into the study is through the skylight, Hughes?" and he
shook his head vaguely, fumbling his lips with a trembling hand as he
replied,
"Honest to God, Cap'n, I don't know. I never tried. I gave just one look
through it, and--" He broke off with a shudder.
"Get a ladder," I commanded. "I want to see that skylight."
While he was gone on his errand to the shed, I investigated the outer
walls of the study with the torch, hunting some break in their solidity.
They were concrete; a hair-crack would have been visible in the electric
glow; there was no break. Then, as he placed the ladder against the
coping, I climbed to the roof and stepped across its firmness to the
skylight. I looked down.
Worth, kneeling on the hearth, was laying a fire in the corner grate. As
he did not glance up, I knew he had not heard me. Evidently the study
had been built to resist the disturbance of sound from without. That
meant that the report of the revolver inside had not been heard by any
one outside the walls.
Directly below me was the library table and upon its top a blue desk
blotter; a silver filagreed inkstand stood open; penholders, pencils,
paper knife were on a tray beside it, one pen lying separate from the
others with a ruler, upon the blotting pad; books and a magazine neatly
in a pile. The walls, as I circled them with my eyes, were book-lined
everywhere except for the grate and the two doors.
Then I inspected the skylight, frame and glass, feeling it over with my
hands. There was no entrance here. Even should a pane of glass be
removable--all seemingly solid and tight--the frame between and the sash
were of steel, and the panes were too small for the passage of a man. I
crept back to the ladder as Worth was striking a match to light the
pitch-pine kindling.
"What about this Vandeman chink?" I asked of Hughes as I rejoined him at
the foot of the ladder. "Does he hang around here much?"
"Him and Chung visit back and forth a bit. I hear 'em talkin' hy-lee
hy-lo sometimes when I go by the kitchen."
"Take me over there," I said.
The fog was beginning to blow away in threads; moonlight somewhere back
of it made a queer, gray, glimmering world around us. We circled the
garden by the path, passing a sort of gardener's tool shed where Hughes
left the ladder, and from which I judged Worth had brought the bar he
pried the door planks off with, to find a gap in a hedge between this
place and the next.
There was a light in the rear of the house over there, and a
well-trodden path leading from the hedge gap made what I took to be a
servants' highway.
Vandeman's house proved to be, as nearly as one could see it in the
darkness, a sprawling bungalow, with courts, pergolas and terraces
bursting out on all sides of it. I could fairly see it of a fine
afternoon, with its showy master sitting on one of the showy porches,
serving afternoon tea in his best manner to the best people of Santa
Ysobel. Just the husband for that doll-faced girl, if she only thought
so. What could she have done with a young outlaw like Worth?
When I looked at the Chinaman in charge there, I gave up my idea of
questioning him. Civilly enough, with a precise and educated usage of
the English language, he confirmed what Eddie Hughes had already told
me about the telephoning from that place this morning; and I went no
further. I know the Chinese--if anybody not Mongolian can say they know
the race--and I have also a suitable respect for the value of time. A
week of steady questioning of Vandeman's yellow man would have brought
me nowhere. He was that kind of a chink; grave, respectful, placid and
impervious.
On the way back I asked Eddie about the Thornhill servants at the house
on the other side of Gilbert's, and found they kept but one, "a sort of
old lady," Eddie called her, and I guessed easily at the decayed
gentlewoman kind of person. It seemed that Mrs. Thornhill was a widow,
and there wasn't much money now to keep up the handsome place.
I left Eddie slipping eel-like through the big doors, and went into the
study to find Worth sitting before the blazing hearth. He looked up as I
entered to remark quietly,
"Bobs said she'd be over later, and I told her to come on down here."